Tools Featured in this Teardown

Video Overview

Learn how to repair your Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus with this video overview.

Introduction

Samsung is back, baby! The world's biggest smartphone maker kicks off 2017 by launching what is very nearly the world's biggest smartphone—with its monster 6.2-inch display, the Galaxy S8+ packs a visual wallop. But how will it fare on the teardown table? Let's get the exploded view.

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...But for all our talk, this rear panel does present something new. The fingerprint reader lives in the rear panel, with a very short cable tying it to the motherboard.

It looks like Samsung designed this cable to safely pull free with the rear panel. With almost no slack in the cable, the gentlest lift of the panel yanks the cable right out from its tiny pop connector. This makes it decidedly less damage-prone than certain fingerprint sensor cables we've seen before.

Cable dispatched, and we've got the glass out of the way. The S8+ and S8 follow the S6's move to a glass rear panel. This design has saved Samsung the engineering effort that goes into integrating antennas into a metal-backed phone, at the cost of durability and repairability.

Twice the crackability and a heck of an opening procedure won't help when it's time to score the repairability.

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We extract the I/O daughterboard. There's lots of ingress proofing in evidence here, including the speaker grille surround and the tiny seals on the USB Type-C connector and headphone jack—all part of that IP68 rating.

The headphone jack itself remains a modular affair—good news for repairability, as this is a high-wear component.